The Night Watcher Read Free Page A

and a good cigar while trying to avoid prison.
    The wall behind the desk was paneled in oak. On it hung framed color photos of the New York police commissioner and the chief of police. Around the photos were mounted Vandervoort’s plaques, medals, and framed commendations, along with photographs of Vandervoort shaking hands with pols and assorted department VIPs. Somehow a photo of O’Reilly shaking hands with the chief of police at an awards ceremony had found its way onto the wall. There was a lot of bright winter light streaming through the window and glancing off all the award plaques and photographs. It made O’Reilly’s right cheek appear especially pockmarked. Old acne scars, Stack figured.
    O’Reilly stood up behind the desk, a tall man with a lean waist, wearing a white shirt, blue suspenders, and dark, chalk-striped suit pants. The coat that matched the pants was on a wooden hanger looped over one of the hooks on a coatrack near a five-borough map pinned to the wall. Despite the acne scars—or maybe partly because of them—he had a face like a mature, perverted cherub’s, with wary, rapacious blue eyes and receding ginger-colored hair, a lock of which was somehow always curled over the middle of his forehead. Stack had long ago pegged O’Reilly as a smart-ass with ambition, an eye for opportunity, and a blind spot the size of Soho. The assessment had proved accurate.
    Obviously relishing his acting commander’s role, O’Reilly nodded to them solemnly and motioned for them to sit in the leather chairs facing the desk. Then he sat down himself, folded his hands before him, and smiled faintly, as if posing for a photograph. Took the acting part of his title seriously, Stack thought. He glanced at Rica, who had looked over at him, and knew she was aware of his thoughts. Not the first time. Damned, intuitive little—
    “So fill me in on the Ardmont Arms fire,” O’Reilly said to Stack.
    “The victim was Hugh Danner, forty-nine, single, a corporate tax attorney. He lived alone at the Ardmont for eight years. Well liked at Frenzel, Waite and Conners, his law firm. No known enemies so far. He’d been seeing a woman named Helen Sampson—”
    “Seeing her?”
    “Screwing her, by all accounts.”
    “Okay, just so we’re clear.”
    Stack heard Rica sigh, then pressed on. “The Sampson woman owns a little bookshop in the Village. She’s broken up, says she and the victim had been getting along well. That they’d always gotten along well.”
    “And I guess she told you two how much everybody loved Danner.”
    “More or less,” Rica confirmed.
    “Well, don’t we know how people have different ways of showing love?” O’Reilly said, staring down at his desk.
    A rhetorical question if ever Stack heard one.
    He found himself also looking at the desk. It was uncluttered, barren of work in progress. Not at all like when the incredibly sloppy and overworked Vandervoort sat behind it.
    “The ME said cause of death was shock and asphyxiation,” Stack said.
    O’Reilly looked up at him. “Asphyxiation? Like smoke inhalation?”
    “He breathed in flame when his shirt was on fire. It burned away his lungs.”
    O’Reilly looked disgusted. “Mother of Christ! What a way to die!”
    “The lab said the fire was started with, and helped along by, an accelerant. A combination of ordinary gasoline mixed with household cleaning fluid that makes it thicker. A detergent. That way it sticks to the body and won’t go out as long as there’s an oxygen source, sort of like napalm.”
    “The lab’s trying to figure out the brand name of the cleaning fluid,” Rica said.
    O’Reilly didn’t look at her. “And this Hugh Danner was tied up before he was set on fire?”
    Stack nodded. “With strips of cloth, apparently. Most of it burned away, but not in time to help Danner.”
    “So the guy was an attorney, solid citizen, all that crap,” O’Reilly said. “And it’s a dangerous thing, a fire in a high-rise